Housing Search
Before searching
Six answers, and searching without them wastes the search:
- Dates and length of stay. A month is a different market from a week — monthly rates on the big platforms run far below thirty nightly rates, and a search priced per night answers a question nobody asked.
- Total budget, not the nightly figure. The number that matters is rent for the whole stay plus deposit plus utilities plus fees.
- Area, at the granularity the owner actually cares about.
- Non-negotiables — the two or three things whose absence rules a place out (air conditioning, a desk, a kitchen, parking).
- Who is staying — children, pets and long-stay guests all change what is available and what it costs.
- When they need to decide. It changes whether to shortlist three or thirty.
Anything the owner has told you before lives in notes/user/. Ask only for what
is missing, and ask once.
Searching
Search each site separately and in parallel; they overlap less than people
expect. Fetch listing pages with fetch_page — search-result pages reorder
themselves and are worth less than they look.
Signed in, prices and availability differ. If the owner has an account for the
site, open it first (open_site_session) and say in the result whether you were
signed in — an unsigned search is a different set of prices, and presenting it
as theirs is a small lie that compounds.
What a listing does not tell you
Collect these per candidate, and never fill one in by assumption. A listing that does not state the deposit is not a listing with no deposit; a missing figure is not a zero one, and treating it as one puts the least documented place at the top of the list:
- deposit: amount, and what returns it
- utilities: who pays, and what they actually run to in the hot or cold season
- minimum stay, and what leaving early costs
- what is not included — cleaning, linen, agency fee, tourist tax
- who repairs what, and how quickly
- internet: the real speed, not the advertised one
Red flags
Worth naming to the owner rather than silently down-ranking:
- no photo of the bathroom or the kitchen
- reviews that all appear within one week, or none at all
- a price far below the cluster for that area, with nothing in the listing explaining why
- the location shown only as a district
- the same photographs appearing on other listings
- pressure to move the conversation or the payment off the platform
Comparing
Use compare_offers: recurring costs are rent and utilities, one-off costs are
deposit, cleaning and fees, and periods is the number of months. It ranks on
money and refuses to rank a listing missing a cost — which is the correct
outcome, not a gap to paper over.
Then judge the rest yourself, out loud: a place ten minutes further out for a third less is a trade the owner makes, not the arithmetic.
Waiting
Enquiries take days. Do not hold the conversation open — start a plan
(plan_start), add a step per landlord, and a comparison step that depends on
all of them. A landlord who never answers fails their step; the comparison still
runs, with that absence stated.
Output
- Shortlist, ranked by total cost for the whole stay, with the arithmetic shown
- What is unknown per listing, and what you asked
- Red flags, named
- Your recommendation and the tradeoff it accepts
